To the best of my knowledge, this is the first mention of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left by the Associated Press. (CHT Charles.) Typically for the mainstream press, the story gets something wrong (two things, actually), but it’s still pretty cool.
Cool! I was afraid one of us had blown something up.
Something that I meant to mention back when the bill was first announced: in chapter 26 of Living My Life, when Emma Goldman discusses a bill that was passed to prohibit anarchists from immigrating to the US, she includes Herbert Spencer as one of the people who would fall under the law! Check it out:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/goldman/living/living1_26.html
Tucker’s Liberty made the same point about Molinari. (A bit awkward for those anarchists who insist that no real anarchist could regard Spencer or Molinari as anarchists.)
I doubt they’ll care, or if they do they’ll just find some way to explain it away. When a commenter at Infoshop News confronted anarcho with the quote where Tucker says he considers Auberon Herbert an anarchist, his brilliant rejoinder was “Ah, yes, Tucker on Herbert. Like he was on Kropotkin, Tucker was wrong.”
Well, for what it’s worth, I think Tucker was wrong on Kropotkin, too. (I mean, wrong in refusing to classify him as an Anarchist. Some of his criticisms of Kropotkin were correct; I just disagree about the import of the criticisms.)
In any case, I don’t think Tucker’s willingness to accept Molinari or Spencer as an Anarchist is of itself a decisive reason to accept them as such. (Maybe Tucker used the word too loosely, or too strictly, or both; he has no more a monopoly on the word than Iaian McKay.) But it is a very good reason to complicate the massively oversimplified story that the deletionists want to tell about “traditional anarchism” and how the word has historically been used.